New boilerplate pacts proposed for cancer projects

Academic researchers, hospitals and biotech companies are frequently forced to bring in expensive legal help to lay the framework for joint cancer research projects. But now the Justice Department has signed off on a plan to come up with boilerplate study contracts. And the National Cancer Institute is supporting the standard contracts.

J&J CEO and Chairman Bill Weldon told the Wall Street Journal that the contract negotiations over new development programs often create a "bottleneck" that slows the process down. So Weldon and other big developers are using the CEO Roundtable on Cancer to push the simplified legal approach. They came up with the standard contract after analyzing 75 existing contracts that bore remarkably similar language. This new approach could save up to a year of wasted efforts and delays.

- read the report from the Wall Street Journal

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